Lifting heavy items and then holding them towards the front of the human body can be burdensome and unhealthy. Depending upon the body type of the holder, the danger of additional stress and strain upon that body can be especially odious. When one lifts a heavy box, say forty pounds or more, a number of physiological responses occur. In such lifting and holding a person uses her arms, shoulders, upper back, lower back, buttocks, legs and feet to lift and to hold the box securely. The lower back especially can serve as a pivot point at which great strain can be applied depending upon how a body adjusts to the front-loaded weight. If that person has any physical weaknesses or physical degenerative attributes, those weaknesses can manifest and will be exploited in a manner that causes the person pain, noticeable discomfort, and/or injury.
Whether a strong or weak body, repetitive motions in lifting heavy items can lead to, at the least, chronic pain or discomfort and ultimately injury. For either pain, discomfort or injury, expensive ameliorative solutions for work place injuries. Work place injuries and pain from those injuries cost companies and governments billions of dollars per year.
When injuries to a person occur as a result of stress incurred from lifting and holding front loaded weight items, a number of losses can also occur. That person can lose time at her job as a result of being injured. During that time of injury, recovery time is needed to enable the worker to be healed. If this injury occurred on the job, insurance to pay for the injury derived from, for example, worker's compensation insurance, is used to compensate for lost wage earnings. When time is taken off due to injury and an injured worker is paid insurance, that person's employer loses the benefit of the worker's productivity and earning capacity.
Homes and businesses alike require the lifting and carrying of items therethrough. Often these items, e.g., laundry baskets, trash cans, industrial containers, industrial parts, and the like, are carried multiple times to multiple locales within and without a home, office or industrial structure. Many times, items to be carried are created with little thought given to their ergonomic impact on the human form. Their design, therefore, can lend itself to pain, discomfort or injury to a the human form that carries the item.
Many businesses across many industries use containers to store documents, materials and the like. A common container for such use is a corrugated file box. Such file boxes are used in the hundreds of millions to hold and store any and all sorts of items that can fit within them. Typically, these boxes carry up to forty pounds or more of materials within them. When a human holds one of these weight loaded boxes (e.g., having forty pounds or more therein), multiple physical stresses ensue. In particular, stress to the lower and back shoulders and arms occur, such stress leading to significant injury over time.
When a person holds a heavy box, e.g., thirty pounds or more, either by handles embedded within the box or by its sides or bottom, and that person has a weak lower back, say from a previous back surgery, such holding can cause immeasurable pain and potential new injury.
In such previously known boxes the standard, slit handles found in the boxes therein have not changed for fifty or more years. In corrugated boxes, in particular, that box and its handles, if any, have seen no change or improvement since the introduction of that style of box over seventy years ago.
In fact, when a human user lifts and holds a commonly used and known corrugated box with handles, a number of changes immediately occur to that person's body. When the user holds that known box (or other containers similar to it) with her arms extended, the top of the box and/or lid of the box will lie at an angle against the legs or lower torso of the holder. Because the box is weighted, the human user's center of gravity is shifted from her natural position within her body to a point outside of her body to compensate for the box's weight. This shift of the user's center of gravity shifts the user's naturally weighted stance from her heels to the front of her feet and along her toes. Such orientation can be painful and is not sustainable over time. This is true because lifting and/or holding a container or box engages muscles in the back, arms, shoulders, torso, core, hips and legs. It also puts the holder in an unbalanced position that can cause slips or falls as a holder holds the box and moves with it.
Also, when the holder's center of gravity is shifted her body operates instantly to counteract such shift and to support the weight pulling upon the front of her body. Such weight pull is compensated by most of the user's major muscle groups and in particular those about her lower back and torso.
What is needed, therefore, is a container using one or more grips coupled with the use of weighted items like a box that limits the shift of a box holder's center of gravity when the holder lifts and/or holds a weighted item thus relieving undue physical stress on the holder's muscles and joints.